Ethernet Link Operations, Administration, and Management (ELOAM) such as defined in the IEEE 802.3ah standard may provide for link monitoring. For example, it may be desired to monitor links between customer edge devices and provider edge devices. In the case of massively scalable data centers, the large scale may require links of 40G, 100G, or greater. As such, link monitoring becomes important so that large scale data losses can be avoided. Prior monitoring solutions, such as Unidirectional Link Detection (UDLD) and Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) do not provide a desired light-weight protocol, cannot be easily offloaded into a Linecard CPU, or are not extensible.